‘Peter looks very pretty in his uniform and is spoiling to be off but doesn’t even leave London for another week,’ she wrote on 9th October, 1939. Early in September: ‘I am driving an ARP car every night from 8-8. So far have only had one go of it and feel more or less OK (it is mostly waiting about of course). Soon I hope they will have more drivers. There is only one other woman and she and the men in my lot (about 30) have had no sleep for four nights, and have to work in the day, they are all in and all going on again tonight.’ ‘When I went to fetch my car from the garage which is lending it I immediately and in full view of the owners crashed into another car, wasn’t it awful. It is a large Ford. However, I have it under control now but driving in the dark is too devilish. All the other people are charming, they think I’m rather a joke, so obviously incompetent. I have signed on for a year…’Before Christmas 1939 she had finished writing Pigeon Pie, an ingenious fantasy of the phoney war period.
